Putting the Library on Your Smartphone

PLATFORMSiPhone and, in the fall, Android for NYPL Mobile; iPad only for Biblion; iPhone and Android for Find the Future.

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New Yorkers who have gotten used to having their library cards dangling from their key chains should probably also look into putting the library’s apps onto their phones.

The library has released three mobile applications in the past six weeks. The most recent, NYPL Mobile, is part of the library’s larger conversion of its online catalog into a system run by Bibliocommons, a private company that manages such operations for more than 40 library systems in the United States and Canada. It aims to make it easier to find books, by adding reader ratings and reviews, as well as allowing users to create lists and personal bookshelves.

It should come as a relief to anyone who has ever set out to find reading material by browsing the online catalog. The system is in a public testing period until September, and then it will replace the current one.

For mobile users, linking the app to your library account takes a few relatively painless steps. You have to visit the Web site and link your account to Bibliocommons, then download the app and log in with your barcode number and password. You can then use the app to find a book and have it sent to your local branch, or get directions to locations that have copies on their shelves. You can also see which books you have signed out and whether — oops! — you have run up any fines.

One obvious shortcoming with the app in its current form is that if you use it to find an e-book, you cannot download the book straight to your phone or tablet. The library says it hopes to resolve this eventually.

Photo

Credit
Christoph Hitz

The library is also using mobile devices to give readers novel ways to interact with material from its collections.

In May it published the first issue of Biblion, a magazine in the form of an iPad app that features items from its collections and commentary on their significance. The library plans to publish one or two issues a year.

The first one focuses on the 1939-40 World’s Fair; the library’s collections include a cornucopia of photographs, charts, original documents and even a few videos from the event. It is not hard to get a kick from the wonders of the electric kitchen, the accounts of the uproar over the fair’s erotic entertainment or the photographs of Fiorello La Guardia with Babe Ruth. The archival material looks wonderful on the tablet’s screen.

But I became frustrated when I tried to do more than flip through the app aimlessly. The articles are chopped into sections, so you have to read a bit, flip through several pages of other material and then read some more. The process gets more onerous when it comes to navigating among articles, and there is no search function. How much work does a guy have to do to read a magazine?

I had more fun with the library’s other new app, a smartphone scavenger hunt called Find the Future. The game accompanies an exhibition by the same name that runs through December at the library’s headquarters, on Fifth Avenue.

The game requires players to seek out various objects or books in the library, and awards points when you snap a photograph of the accompanying Quick Response code, readable by phone cameras. The app takes several moments to process these points, trying to get users to spend some time with the objects rather than running wildly through the building.

It worked for me. I lost an hour snapping photographs of things like Charles Dickens’s cat-claw letter opener and a draft of the Declaration of Independence, and still made it only about halfway through the first of the game’s nine chapters.